Ivan D. Papanin; Led Soviets in ‘30s on Ice Floe Station

The commander and last survivor of a four-man Soviet team that lived precariously on an ice floe station for nine months in 1937-38 is dead.

Ivan D. Papanin was 91 when he died Jan. 30, and at his death he had been chairman of the Moscow branch of the Soviet Geographical Society for 40 years.

From May, 1937, to February, 1938, Papanin; Pyotr P. Shirshov, a biologist; Ernst T. Krenkel, a radio operator, and Yevgeny F. Fyodorov, a geophysicist, lived in tents and ice huts on a floe that drifted 1,500 miles from the North Pole to the coast of Greenland. Their radio accounts of having to dip frozen bread in water in order to eat it and of their dog crying itself to sleep at night made the front pages of newspapers around the world.

The station was the first established by the Soviet Union for scientific observations, but today they are fairly common.

Papanin and his party were plucked from the floe by plane when warming temperatures threatened to melt their station.

Each of the four was honored as a Hero of the Soviet Union. Papanin was named by Josef Stalin to head the Northern Sea Route Administration, supervising shipping and research stations on the Siberian coast. He was made a rear admiral in World War II and then deputy director of the Soviet Oceanography Institute.